The purpose of this study was to gain an in-depth understanding of student, parent and educator perceptions of the effectiveness of the Barton Reading Spelling System. Two research questions were addressed in the study: (a) what are the students’, parents’, and educators’ perceptions of BRSS? and (b) what issues influence the effectiveness of the BRSS? Findings for the first research question included (a) positive effect on spelling, (b) positive effect on decoding and print vocabulary, (c) positive effect on reading fluency, (d) positive effect on writing fluency, (e) positive effect on students’ confidence, (f) positive effect on students’ motivations to read and write, (g) positive influence on reading comprehension if comprehension problems due to decoding deficits, and (h) no effect on oral vocabulary. Findings for the second research question included (a) the methodology, layout and training of the BRSS had a positive influence; (b) tutors’ level of experience, consistency of tutoring, level of instruction, communication with others, value in the program, and relationship with the tutee had an influence; (c) student characteristics of ADHD had a negative influence; and (d) lack of tutor support, education to teachers and parents and application of skills outside of BRSS tutoring had a negative influence. Implications of the study included (a) effectiveness of the BRSS with remediating decoding issues and reading comprehension issues directly related to decoding problems; (b) need for more teacher education on remediating basic reading problems; (c) the careful selection and support of tutors for the BRSS; (d) need for communication and collaboration among all teachers, tutors, and parents of students on BRSS; and (e) need for additional studies on the BRSS in larger samples sizes and in different settings.

We investigated whether a child with Asperger?s Syndrome would demonstrate deficits in awareness of cognitive processing similar to those demonstrated for awareness of social interactions. The cognitive processes examined were memory and metamemory, or knowing about knowing. With regard to procedural metamemory, the child was unable to accurately predict his own memory, particularly which items he would not be able to recall. Declarative metamemory also was impaired. Tasks requiring imitation of the researcher or that were largely nonverbal resulted in particularly poor performance. The findings indicate that the child?s social deficits related to Asperger?s Syndrome extended to the cognitive domain. Overall, a deficit in cognitive awareness was observed.

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Various researchers have viewed metalinguistics as the ability to consciously reflect upon language (Van Kleeck 1984a; Franklin 1979; Cazden 1975; Dale 1976). Prior to schooling, children use language as a means of functional communication through developing an interaction with the environment. They are aware of the content of their messages but not the language they are using to communicate their ideas. The emergence of language is developed primarily through concrete operations according to Van Kleeck (1984a). However, Allan (1982) states that when children enter school and begin to read, metalinguistics is emphasized and the language evolves from an unconscious, experimental use to a conscious, metalinguistic use. There is a growing interest among researchers in the study of metalinguistics. Smith and Flusberg (1982) employed judgment tasks to look at how the child attends to certain properties of language. This behavior is particularly important when studying the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic development of children.

This work has two objectives: a) to predict people's future locations, and b) to predict when they will be at given locations. Current location-based applications react to the user's current location. The progression from location-awareness to location-prediction can enable the next generation of proactive, context-predicting applications. Existing location-prediction algorithms predict someone's next location. In contrast, this dissertation predicts someone's future locations. Existing algorithms use a sequence of locations and predict the next location in the sequence. This dissertation incorporates temporal information as timestamps in order to predict someone's location at any time in the future. Sequence predictors based on Markov models have been shown to be effective predictors of someone's next location. This dissertation applies a Markov model to two-dimensional, timestamped location information to predict future locations. This dissertation also predicts when someone will be at a given location. These predictions can support presence or understanding co-workers’ routines. Predicting the times that someone is going to be at a given location is a very different and more difficult problem than predicting where someone will be at a given time. A location-prediction application may predict one or two key locations for a given time, while there could be hundreds of correct predictions for times of the day that someone will be in a given location. The approach used in this dissertation, a heuristic model loosely based on Market Basket Analysis, is the first to predict when someone will arrive at any given location. The models are applied to sparse, WiFi mobility data collected on PDAs given to 275 college freshmen. The location-prediction model predicts future locations with 78-91% accuracy. The temporal-prediction model achieves 33-39% accuracy. If a tolerance of plus/minus twenty minutes is allowed, the prediction rates rise to 77%-91%. This dissertation shows the characteristics of the timestamped, location data which lead to the highest number of correct predictions. The best data cover large portions of the day, with less than three locations for any given timestamp. / Ph. D.

As the frontiers and futures of work evolve, humans and machines will begin to share a more cooperative working space where collaboration occurs freely amongst the constituent members. To this end, it is then necessary to determine how information should flow amongst team members to allow for the efficient sharing and accurate interpretation of information between humans and machines. Shared situation awareness (SSA), the degree to which individuals can access and interpret information from sources other than themselves, is a useful framework from which to build design guidelines for the aforementioned information exchange. In this work, we present initial Augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) design principles for shared situation awareness that can help designers both (1) design efficacious interfaces based on these fundamental principles, and (2) evaluate the effectiveness of candidate interface designs based on measurement tools we created via a scoping literature review. This work achieves these goals with focused studies that 1) show the importance of SSA in augmented reality-supported tasks, 2) describe design guidelines and measurement tools necessary to support SSA, and 3) validate the guidelines and measurement tools with a targeted user study that employs an SSA-derived AR interface to confirm the guidelines distilled from the literature review. / Doctor of Philosophy / As the way in which humans work and play changes, people and machines will need to work together in shared spaces where team members rely on one another to complete goals. To make this interaction happen in ways that benefit both humans and machines, we will need to figure out the best way for information to flow between team members, including both humans and machines. Shared situation awareness (SSA) is a helpful concept that allows us to understand how people can get and understand information from sources other than themselves. In this research, we present some basic ideas for designing augmented reality (AR) tools that help people work together in better ways using SSA as a guiding framework. These ideas can help designers (1) create AR tools that work well based on these basic ideas and (2) test how well different interface designs work using specially developed tools we made. We completed user studies to (1) show how important SSA is when using AR to help with tasks, (2) explain the design ideas and tools needed to support SSA, and (3) test these ideas and tools with a study that uses an AR tool, based on SSA, to make sure the guidelines we got from reading other research are correct.

Master of Science / Department of Psychology / James C. Shanteau / Situation Awareness (SA) measurement takes on many forms: subjective, direct, and implicit performance, each with limitations. Subjective measures are based on self and peer reports, which allow biases to enter the measurement. Direct measures, such as SA Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT), interrupt SA in order to probe the participants’ SA level using questions. Implicit performance measures are based on participants’ ability to complete SA tasks, which must be created for each domain. A new approach, Dynamic – SA Task (D-SAT), was developed using a microworld wildfire fighting simulation, Networked Fire Chief (NFC). D-SAT is an implicit performance measure that can be adapted to multiple domains, for example inattentional blindness. Scenarios were developed during study one by tracking participant performance and scenario situations. Study two used the scenarios developed during study one to test D-SAT’s ability to evaluate SA by comparing D-SAT performance to an established SA performance measure, situation awareness global assessment technique (SAGAT). While the manipulation used to create had an effect on D-SAT performance, it was not associated with the established SA performance measure. However, a signal detection theory (SDT) analysis showed additional promise for D-SAT being a useful SA measure.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-11T14:03:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bruno Freitas Gadelha.pdf: 2398985 bytes, checksum: b3a236db09882849e479ea1c1ed3b358 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-03-13 / In this work we report an investigation on activity monitoring of virtual environments supporting communities. A survey on the elements of monitoring and an analysis of how they have been dealt with by scientific community, lead us to devise a model for monitoring defined on a specific environment taxonomy, which can be easily combined with a LerningObject-based architecture for recording interactions. A prototype was developed using this model and used in a set of experimental procedures for both external and internal use with an existing virtual environment. / Neste trabalho relatamos uma investigação sobre o acompanhamento das atividades realizadas em ambientes de apoio a comunidades virtuais. Um levantamento sobre os elementos envolvidos no acompanhamento e a análise de como os mesmos têm sido tratados pela comunidade científica, orientou a concepção de um modelo de acompanhamento definido sobre uma taxonomia específica de ambientes e facilmente integrável em uma arquitetura para registro de interações baseada em Objetos de Aprendizagem. Um protótipo desenvolvido a partir do modelo foi utilizado num conjunto de procedimentos experimentais externo e interno a um ambiente virtual existente.